networking A free suite of programs which implement the
Server Message Block (SMB) protocol.
Originally developed for
Unix by Andrew Tridgell at the Australian National University, the Samba
server allows files and printers on the
host operating system to be shared with
clients such as
Windows for Workgroups,
DOS,
OS/2,
Windows NT and others.
For example, instead of using
telnet to log in to a Unix machine to edit a file there, a
Windows 95 user might connect a drive in the Windows
Explorer to a Samba server on the Unix machine and edit the file in a Windows editor.
A Unix client called smbclient, built from the same
source code, allows
ftp-like access to SMB resources.
Samba is available for many Unix variants, OS/2, and
VMS. Porting to
Novell Netware is in progress (August 1996).
smblib is a
portable generic library for making SMB calls for implementing
client/server functions from within any program.
Linux implements a complete file system (based on smbclient) so by default Linux users have full access to resources on LAN Server, Windows NT and
LAN Manager networks.
(https://samba.org/samba/samba.html).
(1998-11-22)